Tucked Away Under the Willow Tree

There used to be a weeping willow tree at the end of my Grandmother’s street. I’m not entirely sure if it’s still there, but I remember thinking that if I could just climb to the highest branch, I would be able to touch the clouds. My Grandmother and I went to the tree every time my family visited from when I was a toddler until I was fourteen.  

Whenever my grandmother and I visited the tree, she would bring her sketchbook and draw me sitting on the tire swing that was tied to one of the lower branches. Somewhere in a box there is a stack of drawings of a little girl on a tire swing.  I wish I knew where it was now.

I was eleven when my older brother started visiting the tree too. Sam was four years older than me. He had no interest in playing make-believe with his little sister under the willow tree. Sam had discovered vaping and realized that the weeping branches of the willow tree that concealed my “fairy land” could also hide his bad habit.

There were only eight houses on my Grandmother’s street. My grandmother had just been diagnosed with cancer when the Smith family moved into the yellow house on the corner. A week later, we moved in with my grandmother. All I knew was that grandma was going to be sick for a while and that we needed to be there to keep her company until she got better.

Sometimes I would see a few kids playing on the tire swing or climbing the lower branches of the willow tree. One of them looked to be a girl around my age. I was enamored with her long, blonde hair. She could have told me her name was Rapunzel and the tree was her tower and I would have believed her. If I had the guts to speak to her, that is.

Growing up, I never made friends easily. I wanted to be friends with the pretty girl who looked like the princesses in the storybooks my mom used to read to me, but I didn’t know how. My grandmother was my closest friend for most of my childhood.

Not too long after moving in, my grandmother wouldn’t come to the willow tree with me as often as she used to. About two years after we moved in, my grandmother stopped coming to the willow tree with me entirely.

I didn’t know what it meant the first time my grandmother said, “Maybe later, dear,” when I asked her to walk to the willow with me. And two years later, I still didn’t see the things that would be obvious to me if I were seeing them now.

The collection of pill bottles in her bathroom that had been growing since she was diagnosed suddenly dwindled down to only a few overnight. The time that she had spent at the hospital lessened and yet she didn’t get any better. After a day my grandmother had said “not today”, my parents would shut their door and have whispered conversation with furtive tones. 

On “not today” days I would go to the willow tree by myself and sit on the ground with my back against the tree and a good book. It felt wrong to sit in the tire swing when my grandmother wasn’t there with me, drawing in her sketchbook.

If Sam had any such reservations, he didn’t show it. The tree wasn’t hallowed ground for Sam like it was for me. Rather, it was a place he could go to do illicit things with sketchy people. 

One of the not-so-sketchy people Sam met there was the girl I had dubbed “Rapunzel”. Her actual name was Rena and she was sixteen at the time, two years older than me. As much as I disapproved of what she did with Sam at the tree, I liked her and I was thankful that she was around when my grandmother passed. 

The day my grandmother died I was at the willow tree sketching the swing to show her later. She had given me a new sketchbook that morning and told me to fill it up with all the things that made me happy. 

I can still remember that day with perfect clarity. I was alone at the willow tree sketching the tire swing to show her later. It had just been that morning that she had given me the sketchbook I was drawing in and told me to fill it up with all the things that made me happy. I had been planning to draw my grandmother when I came home from the willow tree.

Instead, I watched as EMTs carried her out of the house in a body bag.

Rena came to the funeral and I saw her leave with my brother after the burial. My parents were thanking everyone for coming and I had been left to my own devices. I wandered the halls of the funeral home for a while, but eventually found my way back to the main hall. I stood in front of a table that looked like a weird kind of shrine to my grandmother. I say it was weird, because despite there being a framed picture of her, it didn’t feel personal enough to honor the woman that had been a core figure in my life for as long as I’d been alive.

Daisies had been my grandmother’s favorite flower and, sure, there was a bouquet of them on the table, but my grandmother had always liked seeing them alive in the ground rather than cut off at the knees in a vase where they’d wither and die in a few days.

What really caught my attention were the pamphlets that reduced my grandmother to three paragraphs. None of them mentioned the way she smiled and laughed and hugged me as tight as possible every time I came to visit. There wasn’t a sentence that told of how she kept a secret cookie jar just for the two of us in the pantry. And I didn’t read a single word mentioning the willow tree that had been our place.

Maybe that was egocentric of me, thinking only of my relationship with my grandmother. After all, my mom had just lost her mom. I knew that. I just didn’t really understand it.

 Since the day of the funeral, I saw Rena almost every day for a while. She had a weird relationship with my brother, but I liked her nonetheless. I never heard her utter a mean word against anyone and she had a way of always saying the right thing. She liked to draw and I asked her to show me how to draw faces. I could never get the nose right, but she called it my signature style.

If neither Rena or Sam liked vaping and they hadn’t been the only kids their age on our street, they would never have been friends. Even so, they were only friends over the summer my grandmother died and it didn’t last when school began.

Sam played football and so did all of his friends. Rena drew in her sketchbook in her spare time. More to the point, Sam was popular and Rena was not. Sam and Rena didn’t meet at the willow tree anymore. They said hello to each other in school sometimes, but that was about it. Rena kept going to the willow tree, but now it was me she was meeting there. We brought our textbooks and sketchbooks and talked about making plans for homecoming, which was in two weeks.

Rena and I never made plans, but we ended up going anyway. I think my parents said something to Sam, because he proposed the idea of the three of us going together, which I can’t imagine he would have done on his own.

Homecoming came and went. Sam, Rena, and I had gone together, but when we got there, Sam disappeared. Rena’s friend drove us home and I didn’t see Sam until the next morning when he appeared at breakfast.

For the record, I never snitched on him even though it was a dick move.

Dick moves started becoming Sam’s thing after that. He fought with our parents constantly. Over what, I’m not sure. Our parents weren’t even remotely strict. Sam was allowed to come and go as he pleased for the most part. He didn’t even have a curfew as long as he told Mom and Dad where he was going to be.

Sam was a junior in high school. He had good grades and played football pretty damn well. A few scouts even came out to see him play. Our parents were proud of that and told him so. It must not have been enough for him.

Then again, there wasn’t much that was good enough for him. When he first turned sixteen, our parents bought him a beater car and told him they would pay for his gas during football season, but after that he needed to get a job. He complained that the car didn’t have Bluetooth built in.

I kept my distance from him, which wasn’t hard considering that he was also avoiding me. I didn’t want to associate with him and he didn’t want people at school to associate him with me. That was fine. Although, I could tell it hurt our parents that Sam and I didn’t get along.

I think it was the third week of October when I first heard the rumors. Though, I assumed the rumors had been going around before I heard them. That was the way of the rumor mill; the people closest to the rumor usually hear it last.

Word was spreading that Rena had taken explicit pictures of herself and apparently those pictures had gotten out. My heart sank when I heard that, because in my mind there was only person that she could have taken them for and sent them to. My brother.

The day I caught wind of what had happened, I flagged Rena down after school and tried to talk to her before she got on the bus. 

“Rena!”

She stopped at the bottom step of the bus and turned to look at me. Her eyes were red and she looked like she had been crying. I waited a moment for her to step out of line and come over to talk to me, but she just turned back around and got on the bus.

There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to go home right then and there and figure out what exactly had happened, but I had a community service club I participated in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Looking back at it, I should have gone home.

When I got home that night, I tore through the house and went right to my brother’s room, but he wasn’t home. My parents said he had gone out with some friends a few hours ago. I wanted to talk to them about what happened, but all I had to go on at that moment were rumors and the only confirmation I had was seeing that my friend was crying. For all I knew, the rumors weren’t true, but she was crying because everyone thought they were.

The next morning the word “SLUT” was written on Rena’s locker in big capital letters. I stopped when I saw that she was standing right in front of it frozen. Her eyes were wide and there was a bright flush across her cheeks.

I walked over to her and gently led her away. I could feel people watching us. Our school wasn’t that big. Everyone knew everyone. I’m sure that at that point, the only people who didn’t know what had happened were me, my parents, and the school administration.

We made our way to the bathroom, which was empty when we got there. I pushed closed the door and locked it. If anyone needed to use the bathroom, they’d have to go somewhere else.

“What happened?”

Rena let out a shaky breath and a single tear spilled down her cheek.

“Sam- Sam…”

She broke off her sentence, but it was enough. I already had my suspicions that Sam was involved, but it still felt like a punch in the gut to know that my brother had done something to cause this.

Rena told me how she had sent pictures of herself to Sam over the summer when they had been seeing each other. Sam had kept those pictures after they stopped talking and in the last month, sent them to a group chat he was in with some of his football buddies.

An angry, burning sensation began growing in my chest. At myself for not knowing and at my brother and his doorknob friends for being such tools. Rena had been getting harassed for a month and I’d only found out yesterday. I didn’t even know how that was possible. Sure, we hadn’t seen each other as much recently, but I thought that was because we were both busy. I had my clubs and she had her art.

I had no clue what to say. I scrambled to come up with the right thing to say, but Rena had always been the one who was good with words. Me, not so much.

Her face crumpled and before I could say anything, she stepped around me and left the bathroom.

I looked out for her the rest of the day, but I didn’t see her anywhere. I tried texting her, but she didn’t respond. She had mentioned in the bathroom, that stuff about her had been posted online and she had deleted her social media. It wouldn’t be so far-fetched for her to shut her phone off. Still, I worried.

I knocked on her door after school and no one answered. Her parents weren’t home most of the time, because they were doctors, but Rena always answered if she was home. Something didn’t feel quite right, but there was nothing I could do from this side of a closed door. Or maybe that was just me trying to make myself feel better about being completely and utterly useless when my friend needed me.

Early the following morning, a person walking their dog found Rena hanging from the willow tree. She had fixed a noose and tied it to the same branch on the willow tree as the tire swing before jumping off and breaking her own neck.

I should have said something. I should have said anything rather than nothing in the bathroom that day she told me what had happened. I should have... I should have... I should have...

Rena’s death was ruled suicide, but there was an investigation that revealed pictures of her on the phones of my brother and a disgusting number of people at our school. I’m not sure what happened to the other kids involved, but when Sam went to court, he received community service from the judge. It could have been a lot worse if he had been eighteen, but he was seventeen.

 Our parents weren’t nearly as lenient. They took his phone, his keys, and his privileges. He wasn’t allowed to go anywhere except school. He was kicked off the football team and so were a lot of his friends.

There was a great deal of unrest in our town. Some people were upset that such a big deal was being made over Rena. The girl killed herself. No one else did. Why are our kids being punished? These were the parents of boys on the football team who had pictures of Rena and as a result, were kicked off the team. They complained that it was unfair.

Then there were others that were shocked and horrified by Rena’s suicide and what had driven her there. This was the majority of people. There was a sense of not knowing what to do next and that hung over the town like a weighted blanket. It was a claustrophobic sort of sensation that the town was too small for something so big to have happened there.

The willow tree itself was a source of contention for everyone. Should the tree be taken down because it is a reminder of what happened or should it be left up because it is a reminder of what happened?

I was torn, because the willow tree had been near the center of my life for almost as long as I had been alive. It was the special place I shared with my grandmother and then with Rena. At the same time, it was the place Rena and Sam used to meet for a brief time. And now it was the place Rena committed suicide.

What the town decided, I never found out. My parents decided it would be best for us to have a fresh start in a different town, preferably in a different state. We moved barely a month after Rena’s funeral.

At the new house, there is a little tree in the backyard. It’s just a little oak tree. There’s nothing particularly special about it. I like to think that one day it will be tall enough for me to climb it and try to touch the clouds. For now though, I pull out the sketchbook my grandmother gave me, flipping past the sketches of the willow tree, and begin drawing the short but strong branches of the little oak tree.